My latest contribution to the World Vision Report aired this weekend. It’s about my experience with the workers who made my flip-flops. Here’s the official description:
Many people from rural China have migrated to cities in the country’s coastal provinces, in search of steady jobs. Travel writer Kelsey Timmerman met one such couple in the city of Guangzhou. Three years ago, they left their son with his grandparents, and haven’t seen him since.
…and this is a great idea.
Earn college credit!
Tonight I’m speaking at Manchester College and students who attend can earn Values, Ideas, and Arts Credit (VIA). Here’s what the college’s calendar says:
Thursday, September 24 7 p.m.
Wine Recital Hall Kelsey Timmerman on Where Am I Wearing?What’s it like to go undercover as an underwear buyer in Bangladesh? Kelsey Timmerman can tell you. In 2007, he took out a second mortgage on his house so he could travel across the globe to meet the people who make our clothes. The result is his book, Where Am I Wearing? A Global Tour to the Countries, Factories, and People That Make Our Clothes. Says Timmerman: “If we reduce global issues to the stories of individual people, we can better see ourselves, our parents, our sons and daughters and our hopes and struggles in one another.”
You take out one second mortgage (nearly paid off) and every bio that’s written about you notes how irresponsible you are.
As someone who has had to answer the question, “So what brings you to Bangladesh?” by holding up a pair of Jingle These Christmas boxers and saying, “My underwear were made here,” some might think I could vie for the title of The World’s Craziest Traveler.
But there’s a whole level of crazy that can’t be matched by underwear quests funded by second mortgages.
I was working at an adventure outfitter in North Carolina, when I encountered the craziest traveler I’ve ever met.
“I need a sleeping bag,” the man said, “a warm one.”
He looked normal enough: well dressed, bathed, no slobber.
“Where you heading?” I asked, expecting to hear something about the nearby Blue Ridge Mountains or maybe even a trip to the Rockies.
“Turkey.”
“Turkey?” The question was out there before I saw the twinkle in his eye. The twinkle that said, “I’m nuts and could pee in the corner or eat long underwear or book a trip to Turkey for bold and exciting and spiritually life-changing reasons that I’m about to tell you about for the next two hours.”
And he did.
The only thing crazier than the look in his eyes was his mission. He had been reading the Bible and noticed a pattern of prime numbers.
“Remind me, what’s a prime number again?”
Anyhow, this pattern of prime numbers had tipped him off to the location of Noah’s Ark on a mountain in Turkey and he was going to need a really warm sleeping bag because it was a really tall mountain and their was tribal infighting in the region that would make staying at a guesthouse difficult.
My co-worker knew his daughter and that he was recently divorced. His jittery hands hinted that his long nights pouring over the Bible were accompanied with a steady supply of stiff drinks.
Whether he had found religion or was looking for it, was anyone’s guess.
We didn’t have a sleeping bag prepared for the elements he would be facing and would have to order one in. But before we did, my co-worker and I discussed if ordering him a new bag with full knowledge of what he intended to use it for made us complicit in his imminent death.
We ordered it and then didn’t see him until months later. He was alive and looked mostly sane.
I was dying to know what happened in Turkey or if Turkey happened at all, but I didn’t ask. I knew he hadn’t found the Ark. That’s the kind of thing that you would hear about. But I was concerned that he would tell me what he did find, whether it was religion or himself or a Turkish bride.
Besides, I didn’t have the time to listen. I was planning my own trip to Honduras because that’s where my favorite T-shirt was made.
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Got a candidate worthy of the title The World’s Craziest Traveler?
1) I’m speaking at Manchester College in West Manchester, Indiana, Thursday in the Wine Recital room at 7:00 PM. I’ll be visiting a few classes during the day. (here’s a list of other places I’ll be in the near future).
2) Philadelphia’s libraries are staying open! I hope other struggling libraries around the country can say the same thing.
3) Harper bit me in the back.
4) If you’d be interested in having me speak at your school, church, organization, business, or cult, I made this handy page to help you.
5) I got grass stain on the knees of my jeans for the first time in a long time. It feels good. I was playing Aerobie (those things are magic) with my nephew Jared and I dove (okay, I fell) while trying to catch it. But now instead of my mom giving me heck about my green knees, Annie does.
6) The marathon training is going great. I ran 20 miles last Saturday and didn’t die. I have two more 20-mile runs until the NYC marathon on November 1st. Believe it or not the thing that I’m finding most challenging isn’t physical. It’s mental. Running four hours gets boring.
Again, this is why I’m running, and if you’re interested supporting me in my efforts to raise money for folks living with cancer, please go here. I still have a ways to go before I meet my goal.
Do you ever feel like a dog in your indecision? You know those times when you are trying to convince your dog to do something new and they start to whimper and walk circles. That’s how I felt yesterday.
I was driving and listening to one of my favorite talk shows on NPR “On Point”. There are bigger and more popular shows on the radio, but there are few hosts I would rather sit down and chat with than Tom. I sent Tom a copy of “Where Am I Wearing?” with a note expressing how much I enjoy the show. I didn’t hear back, but I’ve kept listening. Unfortunately I rarely catch the show live. Instead I listen to the podcast, which is convenient but I don’t have an opportunity to call into the live show.
Yesterday I did catch it live. Tom was interviewing former poet Laureate, Ted Kooser, about his latest book. I met Ted at a writing conference in Columbus, Ohio.
“I should call,” I tried to convince myself. My hands grew sweaty.
“Nah,” I thought, “you’ll never get on.”
“Just try.”
I dialed and told the producer that I had met Ted and he inspired me to write this story about chasing lighting bugs that ran in the Christian Science Monitor. The next thing I knew, I was on the air saying, “Hi Tom, Hi Ted.”
My tail is still wagging.
Here’s the show. I come in at 37:58
Note: The Christian Science Monitor is very much alive online
(From the archives: Here’s the post I wrote in August of 2006 about meeting Ted)
I’m happy to say that I checked out my first book of poetry from the library since…well, I’ve never checked out a book of poetry. This is truly a testament to the wonderful words of Ted Kooser THE Poet Laureate from 2004-2006. The position is appointed by the library of congress and was once held by a fella named Robert Frost. Poets Laureate are the superheroes of poetdom. Here’s what Wikipedia knows about ‘em.
He spoke at the writers’ conference I attended this past weekend in Columbus and he won me over fast with poems like The Urine Specimen. Here, have a sample:
…You know that just outside a nurse
is waiting to cool it into a gel
and slice it onto a microscope slide
for the doctor, who in it will read your future,
wringing his hands. You lift the chalice and toast
the long life of your friend there in the mirror,
who wanly smile, but does not drink to you.
After the talk I found myself sitting in an easy chair next to Ted. I read the paper and he was flipping through a book. I didn’t want to bother him, but took the opportunity to strike up a conversation after another pesky conference-goer hit him up for an autograph and then left. Ted and I talked for a good half-hour. We talked about football and poetry and everything in between. Ted bemoaned the proficiency testing in schools and how they’ve killed poetry (poetry isn’t on the tests, but fractions are). And how he just heard that similar tests may soon carry over into college. He also offered the following wisdom:
“There is no better way to spend 6 minutes than talking with your grandmother.”
The cool thing is that Ted is just like me and you. I bet he’s never written a poem in his life while sitting at a coffee house, but I bet he’s written books of them sitting on the steps of the barn. Here’s his bio from his website (note: he sold life insurance for 30 some years):
I thought I was a pretty cool little boy growing up.
I was tough. I jumped off the high dive at the pool when I was five.
I could take a hit. I beat up a girl on the bus. This might sound lame until I tell you that the girl was in third grade and I was in second and everybody knows that a third grade girl is like double the size of a second grade boy.
I learned to cuss at an early age, which of course strikes fear into the hearts of sissies and forces adults to suppress laughter and feign disappointment.
At the YMCA’s arcade, to the kid playing Frogger, my Frogger: “Get off my Mother-f*&cking game.”
He did and then I, without any quarters, proceeded to pretend to control the frog.
I drank. If you were over at my house playing cards with my parents and set your beer down and looked the other way, when you looked back I would be chugging it.
We could debate whether or not these things made me cool, but there is one thing for sure that didn’t…
I played library.
That’s right, library. My brother and I organized our bookshelves of Sesame Street, Disney, and Golden Books and then we checked them out to one another after reading them. We had some of my Mom’s books too. We lumped the V.C. Andrews together. The coolest cover was The Sword of Shannara. And the book that I most wanted to be seen reading was The Stone and the Flute because it was 864 pages long.
Late fees were noogies.
I’m not ashamed that we played library. The library in Union City, Indiana, was one of my favorite places. We’d go in with nothing, pay nothing, and walk out with armfuls of books. The smells were free too, and they were wondrous.
When we got home, I grabbed the books and snaked my way through the adjacent field of corn to where our clubhouse sat in a grove of trees. I would toss the books onto the elevated porch and then climb the ladder, unfold my mini lawn chair, and begin to read.
From my perch above the corn I traveled around the world and to different times and realities, only to be interrupted by a passing groundhog or my mom.
Mom would come out with a freshly made PB&J and glass of milk. She could’ve just handed the sandwich to me, but instead she went to the back of the clubhouse and hollered for me to open the window – the clubhouse’s only one. I’d slide it to the side and lower a bucket with a ski rope tied to the handle. By the time I had hoisted it up, the glass of milk would be sitting on the front porch and Mom would be gone unless I invited her up.
And then it was back to my library books.
We lived in corn and bean and tomato country. The fields rotated as the years passed. In our rural neck of the woods there weren’t a lot of places to get your hands on books. There were no bookstores within an hour’s drive, in fact there still isn’t, unless you count Wal-Mart. The drugstore only carried massmarket paperbacks and comic books which explained the V.C. Andrews in our library and my brother’s banker boxes overflowing with Spiderman and Batman.
Without the Union City library, I’m not sure where we would have found books. Even if there would have been a bookstore nearby, our parents couldn’t have afforded to quench our appetite for reading. They owned a small business in which they reinvested most of their earnings. And we read a lot of books, thousands of dollars worth.
It was the books from the library that made me curious about the world and its people. They likely planted the seed for my love of travel and writing. Without them I might not have become a writer. I might not have written Where Am I Wearing?.
It was the books from the library that inspired hours of play in imaginary worlds in which my brother Kyle would often be some sort of alchemist, mixing magic potions and giving them to me to try. The potions were mainly water, but also grass and food coloring and dad’s cologne. Today Kyle has his PhD and experiments on other people.
Without our libraries, what would we be?
This week the Free Libraries of Philadelphia announced they will close after over a century. The library survived world wars and the great depression, but they can’t survive now?!?
As an author, this scares me. Library purchases account for a good portion of first-print runs. (via EditorialAss) Without them it would be tough for publishers to risk publishing first-time authors and those who don’t have big name recognition.
Plus, where is an author supposed to do his research, if not the library? It’s tough enough making a living as an author. If you had to buy every book you used in your research it would be even tougher.
And what would the world be without librarians? I once requested an article by Isaac Asimov that ran in a 1973 Penthouse. A few weeks later I had a copy of the article. (People actually do just read the articles, you know?) If not for the librarian, I would have had to ask your pervy uncle — the one with the penchant for hippie-age hygiene and grooming – to tap into his Penthouse archive. Yuck!
As a reader and thinker and believer that knowledge shouldn’t only be accessible to those who can afford it, a community or city or world without libraries terrifies me.
I was in downtown Muncie, my hometown, a few weeks ago and stumbled into the library. Budget cuts turned it into an archive of Indiana history. A big beautiful archive with a domed ceiling that no one visits and nothing can be checked out. You can walk to the old library; you don’t need a car. There are crosswalks and sidewalks. The same can’t be said for the other city libraries. You have to drive to them or take a bus and then brave streets that aren’t pedestrian friendly. There were five libraries in Muncie, now there are three counting the archive.
The Union City library hasn’t changed much either other than Mrs. Miller, the tiny librarian with the great Story Time voice, has retired. The technology is the same. I recently did a reading there and I had to bring my own projector to show my presentation. The pull down screen that hangs over the door wouldn’t stay down and we had to attach it to a chair with a plastic coat hanger. It came undone and flew up and crashed with bang. It was funny and the audience laughed (see the video below). But you know, it was really sad.
I know that times are tough for all levels of government, but cutting funds to the libraries are the last thing we should do. Roads full of potholes don’t make us dumber; they don’t jeopardize the future of our children, our cities, our country.
Give me potholes! Give me libraries! (Unfortunately in Muncie, we have a growing number of the former and decreasing number of the latter.)
Raise our taxes, fine! Give me libraries!
Cancel the city fireworks! Give me libraries!
Keep your deputy assistant junior mayor in training! Give me librarians!
Give me libraries or give me dearth!
Libraries have given me so much over the years. This year alone I’ve probably checked out 60 books and only paid 40-cents when I turned in a book a few days late. Now I plan to give back and I hope that you’ll join me.
Today I’m writing a check to my local library in Muncie for $10.83. The library system expects a budget cut in the near future of $1.3 million. $10.83 represents the amount every resident of Muncie would have to pay to make up the difference. I’ll also include a letter (probably this post) of what libraries mean to me.
I hope that you’ll join me.
When you do, leave a comment in this post and include your library’s address. I’ll send them a note of support and $1.
If we do nothing, “playing library” might be the closest our children ever get to checking out a book. And that would be really uncool.
(Further Reading: New York Times piece on Ray Bradbuy’s fight for his local library. “I don’t believe in colleges and universities,” Bradbury said. “I believe in libraries.”)
(This weekend I got into a conversation on Twitter with @sloane about microfinance. The Grameen Bank is a shining example of how giving women access to credit can lift families out of poverty. Here are a few photos I took when I visited the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh in 2007 . Below that is an excerpt from “Where Am I Wearing? about the experience. )
Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohammad Yunnus believes in Bangladesh, too. He formed the Grameen Bank, which gives microcredit loans to people who couldn’t get loans from a traditional bank.
I went with a representative of the Bank to see the program in action.
Thirty women sat shoulder-to-shoulder on wood benches in the bare building framed with bamboo and covered in corrugated metal sheeting. The Bank’s regional manager called out names from his ledger. One-by-one, the women approached his table at the front of the room and made their group’s loan payment.
To get a loan from the bank, a woman must find other women to form a small group. If she doesn’t pay back her loan, it hurts the chances of the other women in her group obtaining future loans. The group provides support and a sort of peer pressure to pay back the loans. If a borrower cannot pay back the loan, she reflects poorly on her group. The Bank doesn’t take their home or their livestock. There is no collateral.
Amazingly, 98 percent of the loans are paid back, and the Bank has lent to over seven million borrowers.
Lovli is only 55, but she looks 75. That’s what life as a beggar will do to you. She used her loan to buy bags of gummy candy to sell. Now she makes twice as much money as she did begging.
Shokinan bought a cow with her first loan. After she paid the loan back, she bought a home. After she paid that one back, she built rooms near her home to rent out. Now, she owns more than 60 rooms. Her first loan was for $57 and her last for $4,200. She has come a long way from owning one cow.
Shilpi works at a garment factory, earning $25 per month, but she has started her own business on the side making pants and shirts. She used her loans from the Grameen Bank to buy her sewing machine and materials. She’s 26, has two sons (nine and eleven) and only attended three years of school. When I asked her where she saw herself in 10 years, she got really excited. She smiled, pointing this way and that. I didn’t have a clue as to what she was saying, but I could tell she had big plans.
A first time loan might be only $5. That’s all it takes to empower these women to see beyond the needs of today, to imagine a better life for their children, to give them hope.
From a distance my trophy shelf might’ve looked impressive. Unfortunately there was no distance to put between you and the shelf in my small childhood bedroom.
You wouldn’t be impressed by the gold and silver trophies of varying height. None were that big, but some were embarrassingly small. Half of the trophies were from Spelling Bees. From 5th-7th grade I dominated the Mississinawa Valley Spelling Bee. The entire middle school would assemble to watch their peers spell words. How awful. As bad as it was for the audience, it was worse for the contestants.
The night-before studiers would drop out in the first few rounds and then it would be down to me and any of the other word nerds who had studied the list frontwards and backwards for weeks. Eventually, they would cave under pressure and I would ascend, once again, to Spelling superiority.
I was awarded with small trophies with smiling bees on top, and punished with the promise of more studying for the district spelling bees.
My most embarrassing moment in my life happened at the district spelling bee, but that’s something for a later post.
I retired from the Spelling Bee after 7th grade. I didn’t have anything left to prove (like Michael Jordan), the game was never fun to begin with, and I had sufficiently weighted down my trophy shelf with a colony of shiny happy anthropomorphic bees.
Joining the bees on my trophy shelf were a host of Best Mental Attitude (BMA) awards. Everyone knows that these awards are for people who stink and manage to remain good sports while stinking.
The biggest BMA I have is from a Gus Macker 3-on-3 basketball tournament in which my team lost to two (2!) guys. In our defense, they were two really good guys and we sucked really bad.
My freshman year of high school, I won the BMA on the golf team. I was the 6th man on the golf team. The fifth “man” was a girl named Erica. The first time Erica and I played together we got into an argument. I thought a swing and a miss shouldn’t count as a stroke. Erica thought differently. After that my mental attitude improved. I loved golf. (Sucked at it, but loved it.) I’ll never forget the time our nine-fingered assistant golf coach hit one of my teammates in the face on her backswing. Hilarious. I couldn’t stop laughing.
Come to think of it, maybe I didn’t deserve the BMA for golf.
I’m an award-winning martial artist…if you count my BMA in Kung Fu. It takes a special something to get tossed around and kicked in the face while smiling. I’ve never enjoyed pain so much. To this day, it’s the only award that sits on my bookshelf.
BMAs are for losers who never quit, who show up everyday with a “today is the day” attitude. This mind set has served me well in my writing career. I’ve never doubted that I would make a career out of writing. I didn’t know how long it would take, but I knew it would happen because I wasn’t going to give up until it did.
To this day I get kicked in the face by rejection, I write pieces that equate to a score of 100 on 9 holes of golf. I’m constantly reminded that there are better and more successful writers, but none of this phases me, nor should it phase any writer.
Every writer should leave space on their shelf for a Best Mental Attitude Award because that’s what it takes to succeed.
I heard primatologist Jane Goodall, Champion of the Chimps, on the Diane Rehm show today. She’s been fighting for our closest primate cousins for decades. She said something that really resonated with me.
“You’ve got to find a way to get into somebody’s heart. And just shouting at them and telling them they’re doing bad things and blinding them with numbers and statistics…you’ll never get anyone to change.”
She was referring to environmentalists who take more aggressive and political approaches to the issues. Her issue-centered philosophy dominates her work. A caller asked her about Diane Fossey (the Gorillas in the Mist lady). As contemporaries, Goodall tried to talk Fossey into reaching out to the Gorilla poachers. They were doing the awful job because they needed money. Goodall suggested that Fossey could employ them, but Fossey would have nothing to do with it. It’s believed that the poachers were her ultimate enemies and killed her.
Whether with species or environment preservation or sweatshop issues, I think change can occur if we look at issues through the eyes of all the stakeholders. Unfortunately, progress often creeps along as stakeholders cover their ears and shout at one another.
It was important for me in “Where Am I Wearing?” that I just didn’t look at the garment industry through the worker’s eyes but also the factory owner’s, the middle man’s, the brand manager’s, and my own as a consumer.
Facts and figures are cold and heartless, but people and personalities and chimps have a way of working their way into people’s hearts.
hi@kelseytimmerman.com 
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